I find myself increasingly relying on native apps on my smartphone, but preferring to stay within the web browser on my laptop. This is true even for services with apps available on both devices, such as Twitter and Spotify. In fact, I only regularly use one app on my personal MacBook other than a web browser and Apple's built-in apps - Evernote. I do use more apps on my work MacBook, mostly the Office suite.

So why is this, why the apparent contradiction? I think it's actually quite simple - native apps do more and the smartphone is the center of my computing life. My smartphone is always with and my most-used computing device. I prefer to get my notifications on it, check the news and save articles to read later, and use it to quickly login with Touch ID to check my bank statement.

I can do all of these things on my laptop, but as smartphones have increased their capabilities my laptop has become more of a 'destination device'. Meaning, I go to it for to perform a specific task and then put it away. In between I'm on my phone. When I am on my laptop I want a simple experience. I don't want to go to multiple different sites to update apps and plugins every week (I'm looking at you Flash!) or quit apps to clear out memory. By living within a web browser I have a much simpler and streamlined experience on my laptop and still enjoy all of the functionality native apps can provide on my most important device - my smartphone.

Granted, I'm not doing anything too intensive on my laptop that requires an application to take advantage of the hardware, such as gaming or photo/video/audio editing. For all the talk the death of the web gets, I'd say desktop websites are as important as ever even as mobile websites decrease in importance.